The Politics of Immigration (2nd Edition). David Wilson
fact, their ancestors may well have arrived long before people coming from other countries needed legal permission to enter the United States.
Far from restricting immigration, the thirteen British colonies actively sought people to settle here as a way of providing cheap labor and displacing the Native American population. Many people came against their will—including more than 388,000 Africans who were brought here as slaves between the mid-seventeenth century and 1860.6 Most white colonists arrived voluntarily, but not all. Of the about 500,000 Europeans who had migrated to the colonies by 1775, some 55,000 were convicts deported from the British Isles and forced to work as indentured servants for periods of up to seven years. About 200,000 other whites also came as indentured servants; a small number of these were brought by force, according to historian Richard Hofstadter, and “a much larger portion came in response to deceit and misrepresentation” by recruiters.7
After the U.S. Congress banned the slave trade starting in 1808,8 the country continued to encourage voluntary immigration. Another sixty-seven years passed before the federal government finally enacted its first law regulating immigration—the Immigration Act of 1875, often referred to as the Page Act or the Asian Exclusion Act.9
This law limited immigration by male Chinese laborers and Chinese women. It was followed in 1882 by the Chinese Exclusion Act, and then by other openly racist laws aimed at keeping out most people from Eastern Asia. Europeans continued to be admitted with few restrictions until Congress passed laws in 1921 and 1924 establishing quota systems. The Immigration Act of 1924 limited total immigration to about 165,000 people a year. Africans and Asians were almost completely excluded, and the quotas for Southern and Eastern European countries were set in a way that virtually shut out people from those areas. The European quotas reflected widespread prejudice among citizens of Northern European ancestry against the Italians and Eastern European Jews who had started arriving in larger numbers in the 1880s.10
Has Mexican immigration always been “illegal”?
Although the 1924 law was an effort to end most immigration from Africa, Asia, and much of Europe, it didn’t set quotas for most people from the Western Hemisphere.11 These immigrants only needed to meet a few requirements when applying for visas, such as paying fees and taxes, and demonstrating good health, the ability to read, and the absence of a criminal record. In practice, some of these requirements were used to block Mexican laborers seeking to enter the United States; those allowed in were forced to strip naked and submit to a humiliating “delousing” bath and medical inspection at the border. Europeans and first-class passengers on ships or trains were not subjected to this treatment.
After 1924, the U.S. government actually encouraged a certain level of migration from Latin America. But Mexicans were wanted only as temporary manual laborers. “A settled resident workforce would have encouraged both labor organization and more stable communities, and all that they imply—higher wages, education, political participation, growth of a middle class,” observes historian Mae Ngai. Restrictions introduced in 1924, including the creation of the Border Patrol and the expanded use of deportation, “ultimately served the interests of agribusiness by creating a vulnerable ‘alien’ workforce,” Ngai notes.12
With the 1924 laws came talk from politicians and the media about the need to expel the newly “illegal” immigrants.13 Deportations expanded, particularly of Mexicans, yet so did labor recruitment, for example through the 1942–64 “bracero” program.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act) set up new barriers for Latin American migrants. It removed the discriminatory quotas of the 1924 law, but it extended quotas to the Western Hemisphere for the first time, setting the limit at 120,000 a year.14
The 1965 law caused the number of unauthorized immigrants to swell further in the 1970s, and politicians and the media stepped up their scare-mongering about “illegal” immigrants “invading” and “swarming” over the southwestern border. “Illegality” quickly became the charge raised most often by people who opposed immigration. In the past immigration opponents openly expressed prejudices against the Chinese, for example, or Eastern European Jews. Civil rights gains in the 1960s made it less acceptable for public figures to voice prejudiced views, so the idea of illegality gave people holding such beliefs a cover. They could say they weren’t against immigrants (or against Mexicans), they were just against “illegals.”15
How “illegal” is immigration, anyway?
Law is not a neutral force. Throughout history, people at the top have made laws to uphold their power against threats from below. Even acts like robbery and murder, which seem to violate clear and strongly held social norms, have always been treated differently depending on who carries them out against whom and in what context.
Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it harmful. It was illegal for people to flee slavery, and to help others escape; it was illegal for black people to sit at the front of the bus. Yet those were acts of courage that made history and inspired millions.
Laws can change when enough pressure is exerted. What was illegal yesterday may be perfectly legal tomorrow, or vice versa.
In any case, lacking immigration status isn’t necessarily a crime even under our present laws. As of 2015, entering the United States without government permission (by “jumping the border,” for example) is a criminal offense—a minor misdemeanor, with a maximum sentence of six months. Living or working here without permission, regardless of how you entered, is just a civil infraction, not a crime. While some local officials try to claim such “unlawful presence” is like trespassing, it’s more comparable under the law to a ticket for jaywalking.16
Many out-of-status immigrants use false identification documents, usually in order to get legitimate jobs instead of working off the books. Federal law treats this as a crime, with a maximum sentence of five years.17 Working for a living doesn’t harm society, and most people consider it to be a good thing. But immigrants face more public condemnation, and harsher legal consequences, for using fake IDs to seek employment than U.S.-born teenagers do when they use fake IDs, for example, to buy alcohol. Immigration opponents charge that immigrants are committing a serious crime—identity theft—if they unknowingly use a real person’s Social Security number to get a job, but the Supreme Court ruled in May 2009 that this use of false documents doesn’t meet the legal definition for identity theft.18
Why don’t immigrants “follow the rules”?
It’s easy for U.S. citizens to go to most other countries. To enter Mexico as a tourist, for instance, you only need to show your passport, go through customs, and (if traveling beyond the border area) pay a small fee for a tourist card. Gaining permanent residency in Mexico takes more time and requires applicants to prove they can support themselves, but almost all U.S. citizens who apply to settle in Mexico are able to do so.19
Many people in the United States assume that undocumented immigrants could all have come here legally if they’d been willing to “stand in line.” But as the American Immigration Council (AIC) points out, “There is no line available for them, and the ‘regular channels’ do not include them.”20 Otherwise why would so many risk their lives trudging across the desert for days without water, stuffed into sealed train cars or truck beds, stowed away in shipping containers, crawling through sewage tunnels, or floating on inner tubes across polluted rivers or shark-infested oceans?
About one million people manage to become “lawful permanent residents” in the United States each year. This is a large number, but nearly all of these people gain legal residence either because they have close relatives living here (66 percent), meet requirements for a special work visa (16 percent), win a “diversity visa” (5 percent), or qualify as refugees or asylees (12 percent).21
Immigration laws don’t limit the number of refugees, asylees, and members of U.S. citizens’ immediate families (spouses, parents, and minor unmarried children) who can get a green card, but there’s a limit of 675,000 a year on the total granted residency